Can you expand on the way your ecology studies have impacted the heart of your poetry, and how they intertwine with one another? Is there a specific aspect of ecology that inspires your writing the most?

When I started studying environmental science in college, I mostly encountered stories of loss and damage. I learned about technical solutions to address biodiversity loss or climate change, but over time it became clear we are waiting on cultural evolution more than clever new inventions. Poetry asks me to listen to truth more and more deeply, loosening up my limiting assumptions about what is possible. Performing poetry with an audience there to receive it, I have seen people heal in real time, have felt the edge of our shared future growing towards love.

Everyone has their own niche, but poetry feels like my most direct path to address ecocrisis. “Choose this Winter Morning” does not mention ecocrisis directly, but does serve as an example of how planetary healing occurs at the individual human scale. We will never reach a healthy future if all our conscious energy is directed towards gloom or self-destruction.

“Choose this Winter Morning” examines the way we must accept and address the duality of the natural world, both in its beauty and its ugliness. What is the main idea or lesson you want your readers to take away after reading your poem?

You don’t have to go out looking for winter or suffering. If you are alive, they will find you in one form or another. But beauty requires our witness, to leave the comfort of a warm house and go looking for life in the aftermath of an ice storm. We cannot defeat the fear and negativity in our culture by fighting it, but we can practice opening ourselves to joy so that it fills more and more moments in our lives. Actively bringing light into the world is not about silver linings, but about claiming our power to shape the future.

On your website, you mention that you work with incarcerated individuals and travel the world through your experiences in peacebuilding. Does your work in social justice overlap with your writing? What type of relationship do they have with one another? 

Absolutely. There is a great need to imagine new ways of being that cut through deeply entrenched phenomena. Prisons, war, pollution, patriarchy, white supremacy and other symptoms arise from the same roots, the same violent patterns of relationship. We cannot untangle them one at a time, cannot solve climate change and then become feminists or abolitionists later. In my small part, I try to write about the full humanity of incarcerated people, the environmental cost of patriarchy, try to lend momentum to everyone imagining peace and justice into the world.

Was there a specific moment or experience that inspired “Choose this Winter Morning”?

The poem describes a moment walking through my neighborhood a few days after a winter storm. It had rained ice, coating everything in a layer of slick glass that made the streets impassible to cars, bikes, or even foot traffic unless you had spikes. Then, almost as if realizing it had gone far enough, winter relented. The sun came out, the road thawed, and creatures were able to venture from their shelters in search of food again. I knew it wouldn’t feel warm for months still, but it was clear that spring had started.

I felt a parallel with my experience of depression. I realized I could spend years frozen, waiting for spring, but the question remains if this dark and narrow existence is enough or if I am ready to become vulnerable to the world again (commit your mortal chlorophyl). Watching the sun come out after an ice storm and digesting that experience in a poem helped me confront this choice. I was not suddenly filled with warmth, but I was able to stop going deeper into winter.

Following the stanza about robins tearing into rotten apples, the lines "you can only begin/here" serve as the climax of the poem and also evoke a sense of hope. Alongside the previous, darker images used throughout “Choose this Winter Morning”, would you view this line as a call to action? 

I’m not sure I was aiming for hope as much as clarity. I wanted stark images like “icicle tips” or “sharp air” to highlight the contrast between the two options the poem is offering. Yes, there is a mess of dead plants on your lawn, all the wild fruits are gone, it will be months until the weather warms, but the alternative to this reality is to continue walking away from life, towards numb oblivion. The poem isn’t optimistic, it is about pushing myself to admit what I know.

Where did your writing journey begin? Have you always been drawn towards the natural world as the main subject of your poetry? 

In 6th grade I performed my poem “ode to a chair” on a local-access TV channel. It took a long while until I really saw myself as a poet, but when I started writing more seriously it was obvious enough that my role was to give voice to a wounded Earth, but also to articulate more fruitful futures. I write about what I see and experience, and since I am a part of Earth that generally means I write about the living world.

Read Frederick’s poem, “Choose This Winter Morning” in dulcet Literary magazine, vol. One, Issue No. 2, coming this february.